Saturday, January 31, 2015

The outrageous British
director Ken Russell spent most of the ’70s making biopics, some comparatively
restrained and some unapologetically insane. Savage Messiah, about the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska,
falls somewhere in between these extremes. Adapted by Christopher Logue from a
book by H.S. Ede, the movie charts the artist’s short but intense life,
illustrating how he railed against mainstream culture before dying at the age
of 23. Although the movie is set in the early 20th century, it’s clearly meant
to parallel the counterculture attitudes of the early ’70s, as seen in episodes
of civil disobedience and—thanks to fearless costar Helen Mirren—a lengthy
scene of full-frontal nudity.

As with
most of Russell’s films, Savage Messiah
is made with more craftsmanship than discipline, because very often, scenes
that are acted and filmed skillfully serve dubious narrative purposes. And, as was
true throughout his career, Russell never knows when to quit, so instead
of one or two sequences featuring the lead character giving insufferably
self-aggrandizing speeches about the importance of pushing artistic boundaries,
the movie has seemingly dozens of such scenes. While Savage Messiah doesn’t give viewers a pounding headache the way
that some of Russell’s phantasmagorias do—the bizarre composer biopic Lisztomania (1975) comes to mind—it nonetheless
suffers for its excesses.

Set in London, Savage
Messiah revolves around the complex relationship between Henri (Scott
Anthony) and the Polish writer Sopie Brzeska (Dorthy Tutin). Both headstrong
and idealistic, they meet while positioned on opposite ends of the existential
spectrum—he’s bursting with excitement based upon his artistic potential,
whereas she is suicidal. Henri wows Sophie by making a scene in a public
garden, drawing a crowd while splashing in a fountain and screaming slogans:
“Art is dirt! Art is sex! Art is revolution!” Eventually, the two form a
platonic bond while Henri uses questionable means to acquire art supplies and simutaneously
battles with gallery owners, building a reputation as a mad genius. For
a while, the arrangement works, but then Henri meets willful suffragette Gosh
Boyle (Mirren), who shares his lack of inhibitions. Henri’s relationship with
Gosh creates distance between Henri and Sophie, even though Sophie pays for
Henri’s room and board.

Given all this domestic tumult, Russell ends up
portraying his central character a bit like a rock star—part romantic
visionary, part self-centered hedonist. During Savage Messiah’s most obnoxious scenes, Henri storms into public
spaces, including a museum and a theater, and makes noisy spectacles by causing
property damage and/or hurling insults at strangers. One gets the sense that
he’s on about something he considers important, but it’s hard to endure his
overbearing behavior and even harder to parse his jumbled rhetoric. Still,
Russell puts across the counterculture parallels effectively, and he does an
expert job of using cues from the classical-music canon to score the piece. The
performances are all strong, with Tutin the standout, and Mirren somehow
manages to make nudity seem dignified during her show-stopping scene. Savage Messiah trumpets its messages
loudly and proudly, even if the actual content of those messages remains
elusive.

Friday, January 30, 2015

Among the least impressive
examples of the blaxploitation genre, this cheaply made and confusing crime
thriller is allegedly set in 1956, but cultural anachronisms appear regularly,
ranging from such props as the banana bicycle to various iterations of ’70s
slang. Yet the inability to conjure realistic period detail is minor compared
to the movie’s other problems. Baby Needs
a New Pair of Shoes is ostensibly about a crime lord who runs a numbers
ring. Yet like many other crime-themed stories that are executed without
narrative discipline, the picture wanders far afield of its principal subject
matter, introducing such outré elements as a transvestite mob enforcer who
enjoys slitting his/her victims’ throats. Similarly, lots of screen time gets
consumed with irrelevant nonsense including belly dancing and an opium den.
What any of this has to do with a numbers guy trying to protect his turf is
anybody’s guess. Baby Needs a New Pair of
Shoes fails to impress on every technical level, with the shoddy
photography burying story events in murky shadows while haphazard editing
jumbles scenes together in a seemingly random fashion. About the only slightly
amusing element in the picture is a run of colorful street names for characters,
since Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes
introduces viewers to DuDirty, Moma Lottie, Pasha, Sweetman, and, of course,
Serene (the aforementioned cross-dressing killer). Leading man Paul Harris, who
played supporting roles in a number of black-themed movies and TV shows during
the ’70s, has a solid physical presence but very little charisma, and it says a
lot about the picture’s quality that the actor with the best billing is Frank
DeKova, whose biggest claim to fame was costarring in the silly ’60s sitcom F Troop. There are worse blaxploitation
pictures than Baby Needs a New Pair of
Shoes, but not many—so only those determined to see every entry in the
genre should subject themselves to this flick, which easily lives up to the
second word in its alternate title: Jive
Turkey.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Sludgy family entertainment
produced at the nadir of Walt Disney Productions’ live-action cycle, this
convoluted comedy concerns a priest recruiting a group of housewives and
neighborhood women to topple the crime organization that’s plaguing a
once-wholesome town. Showcasing such wheezy comic elements as chase scenes,
cross-dressing, and slapstick, the movie is made moderately palatable by the
usual glossy production values associated with Disney flicks and by leading man
Edward Herrmann’s affable performance. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine kids
being able to wrap their heads around bits like the scene in which a
church-going woman masquerades as a streetwalker, just like it’s hard to
imagine adults mustering the patience to endure myriad silly physical-comedy
vignettes. Moreover, once the laborious story elements fall into place, the
remainder of the picture is painfully predictable. The North Avenue Irregulars isn’t as insultingly stupid as the
worst Disney live-action offerings, but neither is it as charming or energetic
as the best such films—it’s just a random title in the middle of the heap.

Herrmann stars as Reverend Michael Hill, the new pastor at a Presbyterian
church. After clashing with the church’s secretary, Anne (Susan Clark),
Reverend Hill discovers that an aging parishioner foolishly entrusted all the
money in the church’s restoration fund to her ne’er-do-well husband, who lost
the cash at an illegal gambling parlor. Seeking redress, Reverend Hill
discovers that the town’s criminals have purchased police protection, so the
only way to fix his church’s problem is to help federal authorities entrap the
criminals. None of the men in town is willing to help, so Reverend Hill turns
to the ladies in his congregation, beginning with his nemesis-turned-love
interest Anne. (Never mind the absurdity of a priest asking members of his
flock to engage in dangerous undercover work.) Eventually, Reverend Hill
assembles a motley crew portrayed by actresses including Virginia Capers,
Barbara Harris, Cloris Leachman, and Karen Valentine. After several
yawn-inducing comedy setpieces, notably a brawl inside the aforementioned
illegal gambling parlor, Reverend Hill’s crusade climaxes with, of all things,
a demolition derby during which the ladies use their station wagons against the
criminals’ sedans. Oh, and there’s also a long scene built around the unfunny
joke of Reverend Hill driving around town on a motorcycle while he isn’t
wearing pants.

The North Avenue
Irregulars has lots of events, and most of them are colorful. Moreover,
Herrmann plays his role straight, giving the weak enterprise a small measure of
dignity. However, the presence of second-rate supporting players including Ruth
Buzzi and Alan Hale Jr. is a good indicator of how low viewers’ expectations
should be set before plunging into The
North Avenue Irregulars.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

An international
coproduction shot in the Netherlands with a combination of American and
European actors, this sci-fi mystery includes a provocative central concept and
a surprising dose of edgy sexual content. The piece doesn’t work, partly
because it seems as if all of wooden leading man Hiram Keller’s dialogue was
looped by another actor during post-production, and partly because the story
crumbles beneath the weight of too many bewildering plot complications.
Nonetheless, Lifespan is beautifully
photographed, enlivened by some interesting notions, and filled with arresting
images of leading lady Tina Aumont trussed up on bondage gear. So, even though Lifespan is a mess, it’s never boring. When the story begins, American doctor Ben Land (Keller) arrives in Holland to
work with a European colleague, Dr. Linden (Eric Schneider)—but Linden kills
himself before the two can start their experiments. Undaunted, Ben picks up
where Linden left off, while simultaneously investigating the circumstances of
Linden’s death. It seems Linden was working on a cure for aging, and that he
had advanced to the stage of testing serums on lab rats. Predictably, Linden
was something of a laughingstock among his peers, so Ben finds little
encouragement among Dutch medical professionals. Instead, he finds Anna
(Aumont), the late doctor’s sexy young lover.

In one of the strangest seduction
scenes in cinema history, Ben and Anna attend a party where the host walks to
the roof of an apartment building and blows an African horn designed to
replicate the wail of an elephant, thus triggering vocal responses from pachyderms
in a nearby zoo. “That mating call was intended for the elephants, but I got
the message,” Ben says in voiceover. “Anna wanted to be alone with me.” After
Ben sleeps with Anna, he discovers photos depicting her S&M love life, and
then begins using bondage gear with her. (What any of this has to do with the
main idea of scientifically eradicating aging is a bigger mystery than the
question of why Linden killed himself.) Amid the lab scenes and sexual
shenanigans, Ben discovers that Anna is somehow connected to the enigmatic
Nicholas Ulrich (Klaus Kinski), who was, in turn, involved with Linden’s
experiments. The introduction of this character occasions another truly weird
scene, during which Kinski wears a devil mask while going down on a lady
friend—until the phone rings, at which point Kinski whines, “Now I’ve lost my
concentration.”

Lifespan is a very
strange sort of conspiracy movie, meandering into carnal extremes and
obfuscating central truths so completely that the actual narrative becomes
opaque. Still, the picture has an abundance of skin and a certain amount of
style—it’s a bit like the ’70s sci-fi equivalent of some ’90s erotic thriller.
Better still, the crisp photography presents European locations well, and the electronic
score by Terry Riley has an eerie quality reminiscent of Tangerine Dream’s music.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Considering his godhead
status in the world of musical theater, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim has
been strangely unrepresented in movies. Although most of his major plays have
been telecast in some form or another, to date only six have become feature
films: West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Sweeney Todd (2007), and Into the Woods (2014). The 30-year gap
between A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd is partially attributable
to musicals going out of fashion, and it’s fair to say that West Side Story is, to date, the only
unqualified smash Sondheim movie adaptation. Still, a talent of Sondheim’s
stature surely deserves better in general—and better, specifically, than the
middling film version of A Little Night
Music.

Adapted from the Ingmar Bergman movie Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which also inspired Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), A Little Night Music premiered onstage
in 1973, introducing the bittersweet ballad “Send in the Clowns.” Cover
versions by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins popularized the tune. Like many of
Sondheim’s musicals, A Little
Night Music is a sophisticated collage of intricate musicality and rigorous
wordplay, to say nothing of complex plotting, so it was hardly a natural for a
mainstream adaptation. Indeed, the movie version was financed by a German
company and distributed in the U.S. by, off all entities, Roger Corman’s New
World Pictures.

Elizabeth Taylor, far from the apex of her box-office power but
still a formidable presence, leads a cast including Len Cariou, Lesley-Anne
Down, and Diana Rigg. Set in turn-of-the-century Austria, A Little
Night Music tracks the romantic travails of a group of wealthy but lonely
people. For instance, middle-aged lawyer Fredrik (Cariou) has recently married
his second wife, 18-year-old beauty Anne (Down), though he carries a torch for
middle-aged actress Desiree (Taylor). Meanwhile, Fredrik’s son,
priest-in-training Erich (Christopher Guard), wrestles with sexual longing and
family friend Countess Charlotte (Rigg) laments the passage of time.

The movie
opens with the characters performing onstage as the song “Night Waltz” presents
rarified central themes (one lyric states that “love is a lecture on how to
correct your mistakes”). After a graceful transition to location
photography, the movie winds through its narrative, and most numbers are staged
as intimate dramatic scenes. As always, Sondheim’s language is dazzling. Anne
assures the sex-crazed Erich that “my lap isn’t one of the devil’s snares,” and
Fredrik offers the following observation: “I’m afraid being young in itself is
a trifle ridiculous.” In one of A Little
Night Music’s nimblest numbers, “Soon,” Fredrik contemplates ravaging his
wife, who remains a virgin nearly a year into their marriage (“I still want and/or love you,” Fredrik sings). Although Broadway veteran Cariou has a strong voice, the best performance actually comes from Rigg,
who imbues “Every Day a Little Death” with hard-won wisdom. Conversely, Taylor
fails to impress when she delivers “Send in the Clowns.” In fact, Taylor is the
film’s biggest weak spot, thanks to her distracting cleavage and flamboyant acting
and weak singing.

Yet the ultimate blame for the mediocre nature of this film
must fall on Harold Prince, who directed the original Broadway production as
well as the movie, and on Sondheim. Prince’s filmmaking is humorless and
mechanical, failing to translate the elegance of the material into cinematic
fluidity. And for all their intelligence and sophistication, Sondheim’s songs
are frequently cumbersome and pretentious. The film version of A Little Night Music contains many fine
elements, but if it served as any viewer’s first introduction to Sondheim, the viewer might be perplexed as to what the fuss over the Grammy-, Oscar-, Pulitzer- and
Tony-winning songsmith is all about.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Entertainingly awful, this
kitschy horror picture combines abuse at a home for wayward girls with a
serial-killer storyline to create a stew of intrigue, murder, and sex. As a
result, the movie’s not boring, per se, but it’s meandering, tonally
inconsistent, and underdeveloped. Watched with the right wink-wink attitude,
however, Blood and Lace feels a bit
like a grimy exploitation flick crossbred with a soap opera. The movie begins
with the gruesome killing of two people sleeping in bed after sex, a scene that
features a shot taken from the point of view of the murder weapon (in this
case, a hammer), years before John Carpenter perfected and popularized that
particular camera angle in Halloween
(1978). The opening murder makes an orphan of pretty teenager Ellie Masters
(Melody Patterson), who gets sent to a home run by Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame).
Alas, Mrs. Deere is a cruel weirdo who violently abuses the young ladies in her
care, even killing some of them. Concurrently, Mrs. Deere uses her sexual wiles
to persuade a male social worker to ignore problems at the home. In similarly
sexed-up subplots, middle-aged cop Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback) monitors
Ellie’s case—presumably because of his inappropriate lust for her—and the
mysterious individual who killed Ellie’s mother remains on the loose. Blood and Lace contains a few enthusiastically
trashy elements, including a catfight, but it’s nowhere near gonzo enough to
work as a go-for-broke shocker. (The movie’s rated PG, after all.) Instead,
it’s closer to so-bad-it’s-good territory, especially with actors Dennis
Christopher, Grahame, and Tayback playing the tacky material straight. Of these
players, Grahame comes closest to rendering respectable work, since she
channels bitterness and regret with singular clarity, even though her acting is
a bit on the stiff side. Then again, considering the shabby nature of this
project, who can blame the onetime Hollywood star—Grahame won an Oscar for her
supporting role in the 1951 behind-the-scenes melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful—for seeming disinterested?

Sunday, January 25, 2015

An innocent fable very much in the Frank Capra mode, Hero at Large tells the story of a normal New Yorker who adopts the guise of a superhero
simply because helping other people makes him feel good. Seeing as how his
innocent motivations become complicated by money and romance, the goal of the
story is asking whether a genuinely decent human being can find a place in the
cynical modern world. Timing-wise, it didn’t hurt that Hero at Large was released two years after the blockbuster success
of Superman (1978), starring
Christopher Reeve, which demonstrated the public’s appetite for old-fashioned
heroism. Given this context, there’s every reason to believe Hero at Large could have become a
sleeper hit had it delivered on its own promise. Unfortunately, neither
director Martin Davidson nor screenwriter Stephen J. Friedman delivered
exemplary work. Hero at Large is
earnest and periodically charming, but it’s also contrived, shallow, and trite.
There’s a reason why the filmmakers couldn’t attract A-list acting talent, even
though leading man John Ritter—attempting to translate his Three’s Company TV fame into movie stardom—gives a likeable performance.

Set in
New York, the story focuses on Steve Nichols (Ritter), an actor who can’t catch
a break in his career. To pay the bills, he takes a gig dressing as Captain
Avenger, the comic-book character whose exploits have been adapted into a new
movie. The idea of using actors to portray Captain Avenger at theaters showing
the film was hatched by PR man Walter Reeves (Bert Convy), whose company also handles
publicity for the re-election campaign of the city’s mayor. One evening, while
still dressed as Captain Avenger, Steve foils a burglary at a convenience
store. His bravery makes headlines, so Walter hatches a scheme—find out which
actor did the good deed, put the man on the payroll, and use the resulting
publicity to enrich the mayor’s image. Two birds with one stone.

As should be
apparent, the plot is rather laborious, and a good portion of the film is
wasted on dry scenes explaining the logic of circumstances and situations. This
talky approach drains most of the fun out of the enterprise. Similarly, Steve’s
repartee-filled romance with his next-door neighbor, Jolene Walsh (Anne
Archer), strives for the effortless wit of classic screwball comedy but doesn’t
come close. (Fun fact: Archer was one of the actresses who auditioned for the
part of Lois Lane in Superman,
eventually losing the role to Margot Kidder, so Hero at Large represents superhero-cinema sloppy seconds.) While
the fundamental shortcoming of Hero at
Large is the weak script, Davidson could have helped matters considerably
by adopting a breakneck pace. Instead, the movie sprawls across 98 minutes that
feel much longer. So, while it’s hard to dislike a movie that tries this hard
to engender goodwill, it’s equally difficult to generate enthusiasm for
something that’s mired in well-meaning mediocrity.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Originally published in
1908, Henry De Vere Stacpole’s romantic novel The Blue Lagoon has been adapted for movies and television several
times, but the 1980 version is the most notorious. Starring
model-turned-actress Brooke Shields, who was 14 at the time of filming, the
picture attracted a fair amount of controversy because Shields’ character
appears nude throughout most of the fable-like story about two shipwrecked
children who become sexually active young adults during the years they spend
alone on a tropical island. Even though it’s plain watching the film that body
doubles were used and that Shields’ hair was strategically draped during many
scenes, there’s no escaping the way the actress is sexualized in every frame.
(Costar Christopher Atkins is objectified the same way, but he was over 18 when
he made the picture.) The Blue Lagoon
and 1981’s critically panned Endless Love
represent the apex of Shields’ early film career, during which her target
audience seemed to be pedophiles. Yet one gets the impression that Randal
Kleiser, the producer-director of The
Blue Lagoon, saw the movie as a poetic tribute to innocence, love, and
nature. He even hired one of the industry’s best cinematographers, Nestor
Almendros, to fill the screen with rapturous images of beautiful young people
cavorting on pristine beaches and swimming with fantastically colored wildlife
in crystal-clear waters. Had Kleiser realized his vision, The Blue Lagoon could have been sweet and touching. Alas, because
Kleiser cast his lead actors primarily for their looks—and because he inherited
all the creepy baggage from Shields’ previous films—Kleiser ended up making the
equivalent of softcore kiddie porn.

After a passable first hour during which
the vivacious British actor Leo McKern plays a sailor who washes ashore with
the children and teaches them basic survival skills, the movie takes a nosedive
once Atkins and Shields commence performing the lead roles. Each has decent
moments, but more often than not, their acting is laughably amateurish. This
makes the story’s incessant focus on sex seem puerile instead of pure.
Concurrently, Kleiser’s indifference toward promising plot elements, such as
the presence of brutal savages on the far side of the lovers’ island, means
that repetitive shots of naked frolicking dominate. Still, the promise of
naughty thrills often generates strong box office, and The Blue Lagoon did well enough to inspire a sleazy knock-off
(1982’s Paradise, with Phoebe Cates),
a theatrical sequel (1991’s Return to the
Blue Lagoon, with Milla Jovovich), and a made-for TV remake (2012’s Blue Lagoon: The Awakening, broadcast on
Lifetime).

Friday, January 23, 2015

Part character study, part
cultural exploration, part epic romance, and part musical, Urban Cowboy is s strange movie. On some levels, it’s as serious
and thoughtful as any of the other fine films that James Bridges directed. And
yet on other levels, it’s very much a corporate product—one can feel the hand
of producer Irving Azoff, the manager of the Eagles, in the way the film
stretches out during musical sequences, the better to showcase tunes featured
on the picture’s soundtrack album. Even the presence of star John Travolta in
the leading role reflects the film’s identity crisis. He plays a good-ol’-boy
type from Texas, even though Travolta is unquestionably a product of his
real-life New Jersey upbringing. This egregious miscasting makes sense whenever
the movie drifts into a dance sequence, since audiences loved seeing Travolta
move in Saturday Night Fever (1977)
and Grease (1978). Yet about halfway
through its storyline, the movie shifts from domestic drama and dance scenes to
a mano-a-mano duel involving two men testing their mettle while riding a
mechanical bull. Why hire a dancer if dancing’s ultimately not that important to
the role?

Anyway,
the convoluted story beings when Bud Davis (Travolta) relocates from his
hometown to the city of Pasadena, Texas, near Houston. Bud’s kindly uncle, Bob
(Barry Corbin), takes Bud to a gigantic honky-tonk called Gilley’s, where Bud
meets the spirited Sissy (Debra Winger). The two commence a tumultuous
relationship that culminates in marriage, estrangement, and separation while
Bud starts his career working at a refinery alongside Bob. Concurrently,
Gilley’s adds the mechanical bull, which becomes a metaphor representing the
stages of the Bud/Sissy relationship. His initial mastery of the bull impresses
Sissy, but his subsequent obsession with the machine causes friction. Later,
when Sissy decides she wants to try the bull, Bud’s objections represent his
inability to respect her. And when Bud
squares off against Wes (Scott Glenn), an ex-con who conquers the bull and
becomes Sissy’s lover while she’s separated from Bud, the mechanical bull
becomes the stage for a climactic battle. Rest assured, the story feels exactly
as disjointed and episodic as the preceding synopsis makes it sound, because
there’s also a subplot about Bud’s affair with a pretty heiress, Pam (Madolyn
Smith).

The funny thing is that despite its unruly narrative, Urban Cowboy is quite watchable. Bridges
and cinematographer Reynaldo Villalbos give the picture a moody look by
borrowing from the Alan Pakula/Gordon Willis playbook. Glenn and Winger give
impassioned performances, effectively illustrating the way id rules the
decision-making of people with limited formal education. And Travolta tries his
damndest to make his hodgepodge characterization work, using intensity to power
through any scene that he can’t energize with skill alone. Furthermore, the honky-tonk
atmosphere is intoxicating, at least for a while, because watching acts ranging from
the Charlie Daniels Band to Bonnie Raitt rip it up on the Gilley’s stage is as
fun as watching cowboys and cowgirls brawl and dance and drink. The movie also
makes effective use of two theme songs that became pop hits, Johnny Lee’s
“Lookin’ for Love” and Boz Scaggs’ “Look What You’ve Done to Me.”

Most
surprising of all, however, is the abundant ugliness in Urban Cowboy. Men treat women horribly
in this picture, and women respond by using their wiles to drive men
insane. Some of this gets to be a bit much (notably Winger’s
eroticized calisthenics while riding the mechanical bull), but there’s
something believable about the way the characters play out romantic drama that’s
suited for the lyrics of a great country song.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Even at the very beginning
of his film career, Bill Murray made it clear he intended to be more than just
a funnyman. After essentially transposing his wiseass Saturday Night Live persona into the lowbrow Canadian comedy Meatballs (1979), Murray gave himself a
proper acting challenge in his next picture, Where the Buffalo Roam, a pseudo-biopic about notorious Rolling Stone political correspondent
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. By all accounts, Murray nailed his characterization,
and even the hard-to-please Thomas was enamored of Murray’s performance.
Unfortunately, the movie that producer-director Art Linson built around his
leading actor is a mess. The first clue, of course, is that Murray gets second
billing after Peter Boyle, because Where
the Buffalo Roam is about the relationship between Thompson and wild-man
attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, whom the film fictionalizes as a character named
Carl Lazlo (played by Boyle). While Boyle was a veteran film actor with a small
measure of box-office power, Lazlo is subordinate in terms of narrative
importance and screen time to Thompson. However, this is the least of the movie’s problems.

Loosely adapting two Thompson
articles, screenwriter John Kaye presents a jumbled story about Thompson trying
to write a memorial article about Lazlo, who has disappeared in South America
and is presumed dead. This occasions flashbacks to the duo’s peculiar
experiences over the years. Thompson first meets Lazlo while the lawyer defends
a bunch of counterculture kids facing drug charges, and later, Lazlo involves
Thompson in a mad scheme to arm and finance South American rebels. Meanwhile,
Thompson has unrelated escapades, including a bacchanalian hospital stay, a rambunctious
college-lecture tour, and a scandalous tenure riding in the press plane
accompanying a Nixon-like presidential candidate. Clearly, Kaye and Linson hoped to cram
in every exciting story they’d ever heard about Thompson—a maniac known for his
abuse of controlled substances and for his fearless challenges to those in power.
Yet in trying to frame the movie around the episodic Lazlo/Thompson
relationship, Linson dissipated any hope of narrative cohesion. Where the Buffalo Roam is a
collection of sketches, and very few of them are actually funny.

It’s hard to
fault Murray, who commits wholeheartedly to his performance. He’s exactly as
dangerous, indulgent, marble-mouthed, and reckless as Thompson was reputed to
be in real life. Yet Murray’s performance is almost more dramatic in nature
than comedic, partly because Thompson was self-destructive, and partly because
Thompson was an unapologetic asshole. There’s a fine line between Murray’s
default characterization—the smart aleck who winks at little tin gods—and
Thompson’s scorched-earth approach to life. Additionally, Boyle isn’t funny at
all as Lazlo, who comes across like a raving maniac instead of a visionary.
Some moments in Where the Buffalo Roam
work, particularly Thompson’s rabble-rousing lecture before an enthusiastic
college crowd, but the overall “story” is shapeless and weird and unsatisfying.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Director Jonathan Demme
finally escaped the genre-movie ghetto with his sixth feature film, Melvin and Howard, an offbeat character
study that sprang from a strange real-life episode. As written by Bo Goldman,
who won an Oscar for his script, the movie tells the story of Melvin Dummar, a
truck driver who claimed that he once gave reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes
a ride through the Nevada desert—and that after Hughes’ death, a mystery man
discreetly provided Melvin with a handwritten will granting Dummar a chunk of
Hughes’ fortune. Yet the most unique (and most frustrating) aspect of Melvin and Howard is that the Hughes
connection is largely incidental to the overall story—it’s merely the most
colorful episode in Melvin’s pathetic odyssey.

Melvin and Howard opens with a quick bit of Hughes (Jason Robards)
driving a motorcycle across the desert until he has an accident. Then Melvin
(Paul Le Mat) drives by and discovers a bedraggled old man with wild hair lying
immobile by the side of the road. Melvin offers the disoriented stranger a ride. During the
ensuing trek, the passenger identifies himself as Howard Hughes, but Melvin is
skeptical. After Melvin drops off his passenger, Melvin returns to his grim
life, where he lives in a trailer with his volatile wife, Lynda (Mary
Steenburgen). Melvin’s drinking, inability to hold a job, and lack of steady
money drives Lynda away, so she eventually leaves him, taking their child
along. Melvin rebounds by getting a job driving a milk truck, and he remarries,
this time to the more stable Bonnie (Pamela Reed). Eventually, Melvin and Bonnie set up
house in a domicile adjoining the rural gas station of which Melvin becomes the
manager.

And that’s where the mystery man (Charles Napier) deposits the handwritten will. A
peculiar legal battle ensues, with court officials and lawyers accusing Melvin
of fabricating both the will and the story about giving Hughes a ride.
Concurrently, Demme and Goldman play narrative games that challenge the
audience to guess whether or not Melvin’s version of events is sincere.
Although Melvin and Howard deserves
ample credit for giving attention to the types of people Hollywood usually
ignores—bums and drunks and losers—it’s more than a little bewildering. Melvin
isn’t particularly interesting or sympathetic, and neither are the people
around him. Furthermore, because the real court case went against Melvin,
raising the strong possibility that he made up his story, the movie represents
a missed opportunity to tell a yarn about a brazen scam artist.

In the end, Melvin and Howard feels a bit like a
character study of the schmuck next door experiencing his 15 minutes of fame.
The problem is that the movie runs a whole lot longer than 15 minutes, and
Demme—as has been his wont throughout his career—often seems more interested in
peripheral moments than in scenes that actually drive the main story. So, while
there’s something fundamentally humane about the overall endeavor, there’s also
something mildly exploitive, with the clueless have-nots from America’s
heartland presented somewhat like freaks in a sideshow.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

After making two
low-budget horror flicks on his own, and then a pair of arty dramas under the
tutelage of Robert Altman, eclectic writer-director Alan Rudolph spent the
early ’80s trying to work in a more commercial vein, beginning with this
ensemble comedy set in the world of rock-music touring. Despite the trappings of
a mainstream movie—lowbrow sex humor, moronic slapstick gags, performances by
chart-topping musicians—Roadie is so
fundamentally bizarre that it’s clear Rudolph had not yet strayed from his
arthouse roots.

Corpulent rock singer Meat Loaf stars as Travis W. Redfish, a
Texas trucker who lives with his screechy sister, Alice Poo (Rhonda Bates), and
his weird father, wheelchair-bound gadget addict Corpus C. Redfish (Art
Carney). While out driving a beer truck one morning, Travis spots attractive
young Lola Bouilliabase (Kaki Hunter) sitting in the window of a disabled motor
home. In the course of repairing the motor home, Travis discovers that Lola is
part of the entourage for a “rock circus” organized by megastar promoter
Mohammed Johnson (Don Cornelius). Then, through a convoluted series of events,
Travis winds up accompanying Lola and her team to a show, where Travis saves
the day by setting up equipment for a Hank Williams Jr. performance in record
time. (Never mind asking how Travis learned to install amps and mics.) Mohammed hires Travis to be a roadie. Then, while Travis is “brain-locked”
thanks to a head injury, Lola and Mohammed take Travis to Los Angeles, where his
roadie adventure continues.

Everything in Roadie
is goofy and loud, from Meat Loaf’s histrionic lead performance to the various
absurd plot contrivances, so the picture’s limited appeal stems from its madcap
vibe. (Think nonsense dialogue along the lines of, “What’s the relationship
between Styrofoam and the planet Jupiter?” or, “Yaga-yaga-yaga, this is the
Redfish saga!”) Some of the jokes are mildly amusing, but many are merely
strange. On the plus side, Roadie
features onscreen musical performances by notables including Alice Cooper,
Asleep at the Wheel, Blondie, Roy Orbison, and others. (Cooper and Blondie’s Deborah
Harry also contribute sizable acting performances.) Somehow, the quirkiness of Roadie keeps the picture watchable, albeit
sometimes in a traffic-accident sort of way. Particularly when the picture grinds
toward its outlandish finale, which reflects either desperation or a failure of
imagination, Roadie is like a guilty-pleasure rock song—studying the lyrics too closely takes the fun out of
enjoying the groove.

Monday, January 19, 2015

The first and arguably
best movie derived from Saturday Night
Live characters, The Blues Brothers
is a gigantic 10-course meal of a movie. It’s an action picture, a comedy, a
musical, and a social satire. Yet the film, which was written by star Dan
Aykroyd and director John Landis, is hardly to everyone’s taste. Those who
quickly lose patience with car chases, for instance, will find some scenes interminable.
For viewers who lock into the movie’s more-is-more groove, however, The Blues Brothers is a nonstop parade
of bizarre sight gags, ingenious character flourishes, and vivacious musical
numbers.

Best of all, the title characters translate to the big screen
beautifully, because Aykroyd employs the same gift for imagining the universes
surrounding his creations that he later brought to Ghostbusters (1984), which he cowrote with Harold Ramis. Instead of
pummeling one joke into the dirt, the sad fate of most recurring SNL characters given the feature-film
treatment, Aykroyd uses the main gag of the Blues Brothers sketches as the
starting point for a proper story that’s populated with fully realized
supporting characters. The Blues Brothers
might not be great cinema, per se, but it’s made with geunine craftsmanship.

Whereas on SNL the Blues Brothers
mostly just performed soul tunes with accompanying physical-comedy shtick, The Blues Brothers gives the characters
backstories, distinct personalities, and a mission. A mission from God, that
is. Soon after fastidious Elwood Blues (Aykroyd) picks up his slovenly brother,
Jake Blues (John Belushi), from prison after a three-year stint for armed
robbery, viewers discover their shared history. The brothers were raised in a
Chicago orphanage overseen by stern nun Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen
Freeman), and the orphanage’s kindly custodian, Curtis (Cab Calloway), taught the
boys to love black music. Upon reaching adulthood, Ellwood and Jake formed a
hot band, but the group fell apart when Jake went to jail. Upon reuniting with
Curtis and Sister Mary, the brothers discover that the orphanage will close
unless back taxes are paid, so Elwood and Jake contrive to reform their band
for a benefit concert. That’s easier said than done, since the musicians have
started new lives.

Additionally, the Blues Brothers gather enemies at every
turn, pissing off a country-and-western band, a gaggle of neo-Nazis, a
psychotic mystery woman (Carrie Fisher) who uses heavy artillery while trying to kill Jake, and
the entire law-enforcement community of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Sprinkled throughout the brothers’ wild adventures are fantastic musical
numbers featuring James Brown, Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, to
say nothing of the Blues Brothers Band itself, which features real-life
veterans of the ’60s soul-music scene. Landis treats this movie like his
personal playground, throwing in everything from mass destruction to ornate
choreography, and his affection for the material is contagious. (A few years
later, in 1983, Landis reaffirmed his musical bona fides by directing Michael
Jackson’s groundbreaking “Thriller” video.)

What makes The Blues Brothers so unique is its three-pronged attack. In
addition to telling an enjoyable men-on-a-mission story (the source of the
action scenes), the picture delivers innumerable gags as well as the
aforementioned musical highlights. Each element receives the same careful
attention. For instance, The Blues
Brothers features so many quotable lines (“How much for your women?”) that
it’s easily one of the funniest movies featuring actors who gained fame on SNL, which is saying a lot. There’s even
room in the mix for wry supporting turns by John Candy, Fisher, and Henry Gibson, as well as wink-wink
cameos by movie directors including Frank Oz and Steven Spielberg. Speaking of
cameos, try to name another movie that features both Chaka Khan (she’s one of
Brown’s backup singers) and the future Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).

Long
story short, if you can’t find at least one thing to enjoy in The Blues Brothers—if not a dozen of
them—then you’re not looking hard enough.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Perhaps more than any
other band in the rock-music pantheon, the Grateful Dead were known as widely
for their fan culture as for their tunes. From the early ’70s to the group’s
breakup in 1995 following the death of singer/guitarist Jerry Garcia,
“Deadheads” travelled in groups around the country, following the band from
show to show and developing rituals ranging from the exchange of bootleg audio
tapes to the refinement of chemically enhanced noodle dancing. Accordingly, The Grateful Dead Movie—a concert film
that Garcia codirected with Leon Gast—features Deadheads almost as much as it
features the musicians onstage. From the hyperactive guy in the front row who looks
as if he understands the “Casey Jones” lyric “drivin’ that train high on
cocaine” to the endless parade of lissome ladies bopping and bouncing to the
delight of band members, other fans, and roadies, the Deadheads put on quite a
peace-and-love show throughout The
Grateful Dead Movie. Even if being jammed into close quarters with stoned
hippies suffering the rigors of questionable hygiene doesn’t sound like your
idea of a good time, it’s interesting to watch the audience antics simply from
an anthropological standpoint.

As for the loosey-goosey music flowing from the
stage, that’s naturally a matter of taste. The Dead deliver energetic versions
of several iconic songs (including “Casey Jones,” “Playing in the Band,” “Sugar
Magnolia,” “Truckin’,” and their beloved cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B.
Goode”), with Garcia, Keith and Donna Godchaux, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Bob
Weir, and returning original drummer Mickey Hart winding their way through the
extended improvisational jams that made the band famous.

As orchestrated by
Gast and Garcia, several cameras capture the performances efficiently, and the
guiding aesthetic seems to be unvarnished proficiency rather than flashy style.
In other words, if the music doesn’t move you, the images won’t either. Except,
perhaps, for the trippy eight-minute animated sequence that opens the movie,
featuring the band’s familiar skeleton character, Uncle Sam, cavorting through
landscapes including outer space, a giant pinball machine, a dirty jail cell,
and fast-moving surrealistic backgrounds somewhat in the vein of the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Inconsequential
interview scenes with band members are sprinkled into the movie at random
intervals, but the only purely informational passage is a long montage
featuring still photos depicting the first 10 years of the band’s existence.

While there’s not much in The Grateful
Dead Movie to capture or hold the attention of people who aren’t already
fans, it’s nonetheless valuable to have a vintage document celebrating the
iconic ensemble in their prime. And, in many significant ways, the movie is as
easygoing and freewheeling as the storied concert experience it depicts.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

Whereas some of his peers
in the French New Wave were provocateurs who blended experimental techniques
with radical politics (here’s looking at you, Monsieur Godard), Eric Rohmer
took a different path. Crafting cerebral character studies bereft of cinematic
fireworks, Rohmer was something of an essayist for the big screen, using
copious amounts of dialogue and/or voiceover to explore the foibles of
humankind. Throughout his career, Rohmer made groups of films that he linked
with series titles, and the first such group was called Six Moral Tales. Commencing with a short film titled The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), Six Moral Tales concluded with Rohmer’s
first two features of the ’70s, Claire’s
Knew and Chloe in the Afternoon. (The
latter picture is sometimes titled Love
in the Afternoon.) Both movies investigate questions of love and sexuality
through the prism of men tempted by inappropriate women.

In Claire’s Knee, the better of the two
pictures, a wealthy diplomat named Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy) encounters a
long-lost female friend named Aurora (Aurora Cornu) during a vacation in
picturesque Lake Annecy. Although Jerome has a girlfriend, Aurora persuades
Jerome to help with an experiment that she hopes will stimulate ideas for the
novel she’s trying to write. Aurora asks Jerome to flirt with Laura (Béatrice
Romand), the teenaged daughter of a mutual friend, in order to see whether
Laura takes the bait. Jerome, who is accustomed to doing well with women,
agrees partially because the experiment sounds intellectually stimulating and
partially because the idea of a tryst with an attractive young woman is
tantalizing. Yet plans go awry once Laura’s cousin Claire (Laurence de Monaghan)
arrives in Lake Annecy. Unlike the dark and quirky Laura, Claire is a gleaming
blonde, so Jerome becomes obsessed with Claire.

More specifically, as the title
suggests, Jerome’s preoccupation fixates on Claire’s knee because Jerome sees
Claire’s unworthy boyfriend touching her knee while giving her a line about how
he’ll always be true. In Jerome’s addled mind, Claire’s knee is the way to her
heart. Claire’s Knee tells an oddly
compelling story that’s filled with unsettling sexual implications, even though
the tone of the piece is clinical. Paralleling Aurora’s endeavor, the whole
film feels like an experiment testing what happens when the heart and the mind
interact. (As Aurora says, “Everyone wears blindfolds or at least
blinders—writing forces me to keep my eyes open.”) The women in Jerome’s life
display various fascinating colors, from Aurora’s playful detachment to
Claire’s youthful arrogance to Laura’s sexy insouciance. In the middle of all
this female energy is Jerome, whom Rohmer uses to represent a prevalent sort of
testosterone-driven entitlement. “When something pleases me, I do it for
pleasure,” Jerome says. “Why tie myself down with one woman when others
interest me?”

Detractors of Rohmer’s restrained style could easily complain
about the static visuals and the absence of a major climax, but Claire’s Knee adroitly captures the
ephemeral feelings that people experience while moving through the intricate
dance of attraction, achieving intimacy at one moment and lapsing into distance
the next. Subtle profundities abound, and Rohmer’s filmmaking is as elegant in
its simplicity as the acting of the expert cast is incisive.

The follow-up
movie, Chloe in the Afternoon, tries
to do more than its predecessor but ends up accomplishing less. The picture
concerns a lawyer named Frédéric (Bernard Vaerley), who is married to beautiful
teacher Hélène (Françoise Verley) but still has a wandering eye. During the
first part of the film, Frédéric explains his shapeless ennui in voiceover: “The
prospect of quiet happiness stretching indefinitely before me depresses me.” Put more bluntly, Frédéric is bored by marriage and preoccupied with the
notion of fresh romantic conquests. Accordingly, he experiences a long fantasy
sequence during which he wears an amulet that robs beautiful women of free
will, giving him endless access to new sex partners. (Many of the actresses
from Claire’s Knee cameo in this
sequence.) Once the story proper gets underway, around 25 minutes into Chloe in the Afternoon, Frédéric
receives a visit from an old flame, Chloé (played by one-named Gallic starlet
Zouzou). In modern vernacular, she’s a hot mess, having spent years bouncing
from job to job and from lover to lover without setting down roots. Frédéric
helps Chloé get back on her feet, and the two steadily advance toward a
tryst—even as Frédéric wrestles with the potential repercussions of
transforming his erotic dreams into reality.

The beauty of Claire’s Knee is that it’s about, at least in part, a man realizing
that his sense of sexual omnipotence is an illusion. The story is palatable
because it humanizes a would-be Casanova. By comparison, Chloe in the Afternoon seems pedestrian and, within the chaste
parameters of Rohmer’s style, déclassé. Beneath the surface of articulate
dialogue and meticulous dramaturgy, it’s a trite tale about a wannabe philanderer
who toys with the emotions of a vulnerable woman. After all, is Frédéric’s
lament that “I take Hélène too seriously to be serious with her” anything but a
trussed-up version of the old saw, “She doesn’t understand me”?Chloe in the Afternoon is a serious and worthwhile rumination on
matters of the heart, but it’s not as novel or provocative as Claire’s Knee.

Friday, January 16, 2015

A gonzo hybrid blending
creature-feature elements with the tropes of post-apocalyptic melodrama, Chosen Survivors features a doozy of a
plot—several individuals who were unknowingly handpicked by the government to
restart the human race get kidnapped, drugged, and stashed inside an
underground fallout shelter just before a devastating nuclear attack, only to
discover that the shelter is infested with vicious vampire bats. Predictably,
the pressure of the horrific situation brings out the best in some people and
the worst in others, so Chosen Survivors
ends up borrowing narrative DNA from a third major genre, the disaster movie.
Given the far-fetched premise, it should come as no surprise to say that Chosen Survivors fails to achieve
anything resembling credibility. This thing is outrageous and even a little bit
silly from start to finish. Nonetheless, what Chosen Survivors lacks in quality, in makes up for in vibe. The
picture is dark, fast, and nasty, so it feels a bit like an early John
Carpenter movie, right down to the lean and ominous musical score. Enjoying the
movie requires that viewers ignore major lapses in logic, but it’s a fun ride
for those willing to follow Chosen
Survivors down its bizarre path.

The movie begins enigmatically, with
helicopters landing in a remote site and discharging the principal characters,
who are then roughly escorted into an elevator shaft by military personal. The
drugged states of the characters are depicted with distorted slow-motion
images, jarring edits, and weird music, so the long trip the characters take
from the surface to their new subterranean home is fairly trippy. Eventually,
the caretaker of the fallout shelter, Major Gordon Ellis (Richard Jaeckel),
explains that the “chosen survivors” were doped because there wasn’t time to
risk the participants refusing to cooperate. According to Ellis, the surface of
America has been obliterated by nuclear bombs, so the “chosen survivors” must
live underground and procreate until it’s safe to emerge from the shelter.
Among the eclectic gang are scientists Lenore Chrisman (Barbara Babcock), Alana
Fitzgerald (Diana Muldaur), Peter Macomber (Bradford Dillman), and Steven Mayes
(Alex Cord); wealthy businessman Raymond Couzins (Jackie Cooper); and Olympic
athlete Woody Russo (Lincoln Kilpatrick).

Friction between these people materializes
even before the first bat attack, with Cooper’s unhinged character trying to
bribe others into releasing him because he doesn’t believe a nuclear attack
occurred. Then, once the bats start biting, people go completely off the deep
end. Cooper’s character tries to rape one of the female doctors, Dillman’s
character retreats into analytical mode by observing the dissipation of the
group instead of helping solve problems, and Cord’s character becomes morbidly
philosophical. (In one of the movie’s most quintessentially ’70s moments, Cord
purrs hippy-dippy musings about the inherent faults of the human race: ‘”The
world’s too big. People don’t have time. People don't even have time for
people. That's why I got so hyped on this place. It’s not too big.”

Interspersed with the quiet scenes are wild action/horror sequences, some of which
gain a surreal quality thanks to the use of cheesy and unconvincing special
effects. In fact, whenever Chosen
Survivors hits a groove of optically inserted bats chomping victims to the
accompaniment of jittery electronic music, the picture becomes cartoonishly nihilistic—think
Saturday-matinee action viewed through the prism of a nightmare. Further, the movie is
stylishly shot, with lots of claustrophobic compositions and dense color
filters and oppressive shadows, while the cast of mostly B-level actors
contributes appropriately over-the-top acting. Dillman is
enjoyably twitchy, and Kilpatrick has a great moment when his character makes a
sweaty climb up the elevator shaft while besieged by bats.